House to louse: Losing the love

Period architecture is all well and good, but a lack of yard doesn't cut it when you're trying to enjoy an evening walkabout

The current place is nice, but "it's all house and no land," our Dream House diarist says.

Photograph by: Abigail Pugh
, National Post

This, and subsequent instalments in this series, is the story of how my family and I work to find inventive solutions to create a dream home. We begin with our current rather lovely abode, but it's one that doesn't fulfill all our needs. What we need is not affordable, though, so we've rethought our real estate plan, and purchased what is a very un-dreamlike (but well-priced) house in a neighbourhood that appears to have everything. Will it be the one? This is our journey.

The faultless fantasy space in which, ideally, I would raise my daughter, is old and effortlessly lovely. It oozes character and needs little alteration to make it move-in perfect. Its exterior is calmly classic and will never date. Indoors it's lofty and broad, with boatloads of exquisite detail finessed by the hands of craftsmen both exceptionally skilled, and long dead. It sits on a wide, long piece of land in a vibrant part of Toronto where feet and the bicycle are king, independent cafés and bookstores rule the streetscape and children and cats can prowl the streets without danger.

Because it's a fantasy, it's $500,000 tops. And that would be both its asking, and its expected, price. Nobody else would bid; they'd all be busy at humanitarian, non real-estate-related tasks that day.

Till I bought a weird house last December (about which more, in the coming weeks), my real-world residential CV was as coherent, if unoriginal, as my fantasy home - and of course, the two had vague connections.

Raised in the insular rabbit warren of middle class North London, I knew only one flavour of house: the mid-Victorian townhouse. These homes exuded a uniformly overstuffed, semi-crumbling feel: all stairs, rattling windowpanes and deliberately under-adorned exteriors ("so the burglars don't choose us"). They weren't ideal family homes but they were respectably antique and therefore more coveted than anything modern.

As a young woman, recently immigrated to 1990s Toronto, it was obvious to me that the pretty, old house along the lines of my childhood homes, was the only way to go. The detacheds and semis of Parkdale seemed a delightfully strange smorgasbord of neglected turrets and gingerbread-gothic.

Back then, lovely examples were priced under $200,000. Duplexed and with a roommate or two in the game plan, I had a home I could truly love for a very long time.

I contentedly - probably smugly - inhabited my antique house for the next decade-anda-half. Then, three years ago, I become a mother and our family of three (plus dog) expanded its terrain to an entire three floors of space in the identical house next door. It's pretty damn great. Our space has been photographed for Toronto homes-blog The Marion House Book and we love the grace of period rooms built from local, time-honoured materials.

But being in my forties and becoming a mother have brought a deep yearning for things our house can never provide. For a start: It's all house and no land. The 65-foot lot means a small decked-over yard, truncated by the intimidating (luckily windowless) brick flank of a house at right angles to ours. I call our lack of outdoor space The Gardening Problem: No matter how many perennials I try to cram into my small front flowerbed, there will never be room for an evening walkabout, and even weeding it is a frustratingly instantaneous exercise.

Another frustration of growing significance is that the nearest parks are both 30 minutes away on foot - and we choose not to own a car. There's nowhere accessible on an easy (therefore daily) basis, for our three-year-old daughter Sheba to do the things I was able to do growing up: run till she's tired, toboggan, lie under a tree or find a secluded bench for gossiping. We are 20 minutes' walk from no less than three farmer's markets - Sorauren, Liberty Village and Dufferin Grove - but that's a long trek with heavy produce, so except in summertime we rarely bother. Pippin, our collieshepherd cross, is good about walking a mile each way down Queen to get to his beloved offleash at Trinity Bellwoods, but he'd prefer the sidewalk/park ratio to shift significantly within his lifetime.

Lovely as it is, the house is assuming a split personality for me: cavernously welcoming in winter, and dark, landless and restrictive in summer. Off-leash potential (dog and human leashes both) was something I have been starting to have a semineurotic obsession about. My unconscious mind rose to the occasion recently and created a crisis moment, wherein I literally woke one morning with tears on my cheeks after a dream involving empty, green space.

Since period charm has a price tag - perhaps an even greater price tag than street quality or lot size - could the elegance we love be the thing we trade for a liveable yet modern space, and more of the non-house family amenities that we've come to miss so much?

Watch for Dream House Diaries online next week at nationalpost.com/homes. The instalments alternate weekly between print and online.

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